'I always come away with a smile on my face': The Yorkshire Vet's Peter Wright on his 40-year friendship with the Greens

By the time he returned eight years later, now a young vet working alongside Alf and Donald Sinclair, Steve had married his beloved wife Jean after a whirlwind romance of a matter of months, and the couple soon became regular clients for Peter, who would give veterinary care to their animals at Stoneybrough Farm.

As viewers of the documentary series The Yorkshire Vet and its spin-off The Yorkshire Vet: At Home with the Greens will know, that relationship continues more than 40 years later, with Peter and the Greens now firm friends.

“I have always come away from there with a smile on my face,” says 70-year-old Peter. “What you see is what you get and there’s no great difference between me turning up one afternoon to see how they are and the conversations that go on to how things are when the cameras are rolling picking up on their lives. It’s just how they are. If it was false, people would see straight through it. But it’s very genuine and I think that’s part of what people buy into.”

After the couple’s popularity on The Yorkshire Vet, it was decided they would get their own show, as some of Britain’s oldest working farmers. Since the first season of At Home with The Greens aired on Channel 5 in 2024, produced by Leeds-based Daisybeck Studios, viewers have been able to gain an insight into how the couple manage their smallholding with traditional farming practices, and enjoy a simple, ‘old-school’ lifestyle, without modern luxuries.

“The show was driven by the viewers really,” notes Peter. “People took to them because of their eccentricity. It is eccentric these days is their lifestyle. It used to be the norm but nowadays it isn’t. They became firm favourites because of the way they led their lives and I think people could see how happy they were…Now the Greens have become quite iconic in their own right and the nation and beyond, across many countries, have really fallen in love with them.”

He continues: “People sometimes say to them why don’t you retire and go live in a nice comfortable bungalow somewhere? That would kill Steve Green because it would be so divorced from his life and what he’s known all these years. He just couldn’t do it. The pair of them really, they just don’t know anything else.”

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In season three, launching next week, however, Steve, 96, and Jean, 73, will be seen embracing new experiences, proving they’re still ‘willing for a shilling’ (to use Jean’s words) to give unfamiliar things a go. Despite their age trying to catch up with them, the couple remain determined to make the most out of life.

That means a visit to an open air living history museum, where a hilarious photo session transports them back in time; meeting students at an agricultural college, where the Greens entertain the next generation with tales of how things used to be; a trip to Brontë Country for Haworth’s famous Steampunk Weekend; getting to grips with a robot vacuum cleaner; and an introduction to social media and the world of online influencers.

Peter says: “In some ways they are stepping out of their comfort zone to take on things from the modern world which they probably wouldn’t have done if they hadn’t been coaxed into it. But they roll their sleeves up with Yorkshire grit and determination and their no nonsense approach to life.”

He’s on hand to help out the duo, with support from his wife Lin, and from TV farmers Rob and Dave Nicholson of Barnsley’s Cannon Hall Farm. In the first episode, he steps in to lend a hand when Jean has to go to hospital for a gallbladder operation, leaving Steve struggling on alone. Peter also rekindles Steve’s love of writing and poetry at a special event in Thirsk, inspiring him to pen a love poem for Jean. And once Jean is finally back home but unable to travel, Peter hatches a grand plan - to bring Whitby to the Greens, by turning the farm into Stoneybrough-on-Sea.

Peter says: “Steve and Jean behave like lovestruck teenagers and it’s lovely to see. When Jean went into hospital, Steve was lost without her...It brings it home how deep their relationship is.”

“I wouldn’t say the Greens are unique but certainly in this modern age, they do stand out for a very happy simple lifestyle from the past,” he adds. “People nowadays are leading very busy, very stressful lives, maybe commuting into the city to work or sitting in front of a computer all day long, then they come back and turn the telly on and the Greens are there with their lifestyle which is from a different age, but one perhaps many people now yearn for. I think everyone can see the happy and fulfilled lives the Greens lead.”

The new series of The Yorkshire Vet: At Home with the Greens starts on Thursday, November 19, at 8pm on Channel 5.